Let's say you're a rock star seeking to further your career. Should you die suddenly and prematurely, in a dramatic fashion? Sure as shooting, says Chuck Klosterman. "Dying is the only thing that guarantees a rock star will have a legacy that stretches beyond contemporary relevance ... unless you're Shannon Hoon." Ah, thanks for the tip. Shannon who?

This is typical of Klosterman, a 33-year-old music journalist who has written two other non-fiction books about pop music: a memoir and a collection of essays. With immense affability, he welcomes you into his world from the start, establishing his unpretentious persona by stressing how he, an Ohio boy who thinks "the first Pretenders record is OK", feels out of place in New York City - a nerd out of water.

It's hard not to be instantly won over, especially if you liked John Cusack in High Fidelity. When you learn that Klosterman (or Chuck, as I'm sure he wouldn't mind me calling him) is proposing to take you with him on a 6,557-mile road trip across America, all you want to do is leap into the passenger seat, duffel bag in hand, and sing along to "Horse With No Name" on the car stereo. (In fact, his horse does have a name: he christens his rented Ford Taurus the Ford Tauntan, "just in case I drive into an August blizzard and have to stuff a freezing Luke Skywalker into the cosy engine block".)

And what a trip it is. Chuck starts out at the Chelsea Hotel, where Sid Vicious stabbed Nancy Spungen in 1978. It's not exactly a gold mine: the receptionist tells him the room where the crime took place no longer exists, and the manager tells him to get lost. He does, and not for the last time: the Tauntan's GPS has trouble coping with such remote spots as the crossroads in Macon, Virginia, where two of the Allman Brothers died in separate motorcycle accidents, a year apart. But he manages to cruise past celebrity rock death sites from Rhode Island (the 2003 Great White concert fire) through Mississippi (Lynyrd Skynyrd plane crash), Tennessee (Elvis, Jeff Buckley), Iowa (Buddy Holly/Big Bopper/Ritchie Valens plane crash), Minneapolis (Bob Stinson of the Replacements) and finally Seattle (Kurt Cobain and a surprisingly large number of others).

In proper post-Eggers style, Chuck is very specific about the fact that you can't trust him: 85% of the book, he says, is true. But the deception goes deeper than mere porkies. Gradually it becomes clear that Chuck, candid though he may be, is only willing to let us into 85% of his world. Crucial details are left out, mainly the ones that would embarrass him or his ex-girlfriends, several of whom play major roles. He skirts the issue by thinking about his one great love, pop music, which makes for some good lines: "What's frightening me is the realisation that the only way I can intellectually organise the women I have loved is by thinking about the members of Kiss." This is a man who is only 85% sure what's going on in his own head - if that.

But that doesn't make him any less fun to be with. Even if your world is not exactly his world - as well as Shannon "lead singer of Blind Melon" Hoon, he bandies about such Googlable names as Gutzon Borglum, Art Modell and Ace Frehley - it's a pleasure to be along for the ride. Despite his morbid leanings, Chuck is helplessly, hilariously stuck in the land of the living. As he drives away from the spot where the Valens-Bopper comet plunged to earth, his main thought is for Waylon Jennings, the musician who decided to drive instead of fly that day: the survivor.